THE TRAGIC MURDER OF JESSICA LUNSFORD

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime case today is part two of the jessica lunsford case if you didn't catch part one it was my last upload i'll link it up here in the eye you kind of need to watch that one before you watch this one otherwise this one won't really make much sense i'll wait i'll let you go and watch this one and then come right back here for part two but quickly before we do continue with this case i just want to thank our sponsor for making this video possible nordvpn nordvpn is my favorite virtual private network service i use it all the time to make sure that i'm keeping my information safe while i'm using the internet there will always be people out there on the internet dangerous people that are going to try and hack you or access your information and i think you would be a little bit daft to not use a vpn in 2021. it's so so important to stay protected a vpn works kind of like a barrier between you and all of your information and people out 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wi-fi networks are like the free wi-fi protect yourself and not vpn are very very kindly offering you guys a huge discount off of a two-year plan plus a bonus gift when you go through my link which is not vpn.com forward slash eleanor and use the code eleanor at checkout to redeem that you are very very welcome thanks again to nordvpn for sponsoring this video now before we get into it i do just want to give the same content warnings that i gave in part one this case does involve the sexual assault and murder of a child which is a very very hard topic to listen to i totally understand if you want to click out this video please look after yourself that is the most important thing i'm sure i'll see you again at some point with another case that's maybe a little bit more suitable for you that being said i'm gonna give a quick little summary of part one and then we're just gonna flour straight into part two of this case jessica lunsford was a nine-year-old girl living in a trailer park in florida with her adoring father and grandparents but then one night in february of 2005 jessica just disappeared from her bed in the middle of the night police believed it to be a kidnapping the front door was left unlocked in the middle of the night and it seemed as though someone had literally just walked into the house grabbed jessie and left so right now in the case police are looking into local sex offenders in the area and trying to rule them out kind of process of elimination and that was when they came across 46 year old sex offender john cooey a man that was actually known for previous pedophilia charges and at the time of jessica lunsford's disappearance it's believed that john cooey was living just 100 yards away in a different trailer park but when police went knocking on his trailer to go and speak to john kerry he was nowhere to be found he'd done a runner so police obtained a search warrant and they went inside they searched high and low in this trailer and that was when they found a stain on john cooey's mattress a blood stain so they confronted the other people that lived in this trailer because john curry didn't live alone here he lived with his sister dorothy dixon her boyfriend two other people who by the way all of these roommates had been denying knowing where john cooey was they even denied that he lived there so police went to all of these roommates and they went fine if you guys are so innocent why is there a blood stain on this mattress and i think it was at this point that they all realized that they would be in big trouble if they didn't come clean to the police and so john cooey's sister dorothy dixon just broke she admitted everything that jonkery lived in that trailer that was his bedroom that was his bed that was his mattress with blood on it other than that though she was adamant that she didn't know where the blood came from she didn't know where her brother had gone she had no idea where jessica was she'd never seen jessica she had nothing to do with her disappearance she didn't know whether her brother was involved or not all she knew was that he had been there he had been staying on that bloodstained mattress and now he was gone so this was obviously huge for police and so they asked dorothy dixon to go back to the police station with them and they decided to question her further about her brother dorothy told the police that on the night that jessica lunsford was kidnapped from her own trailer she and john cooey and all of their friends had been out drinking they'd all been around at a friend's scrap yard just drinking beers doing cooking they were there until like 1am and it was at that point that they actually ran out of substances they ran out of cocaine they drank all the beers and they didn't really have any money for any more so they decided to just call it a night they decided to just go to bed so they all went back to this trailer that they shared and they all went to their separate bedrooms and went to bed and that was the last any of them saw of john cooey that he went to bed around 1am whereas police believe that jessica lundsford was kidnapped anywhere between like 2 a.m and 5 a.m so it could still be jon cooy maybe he couldn't sleep at 1am maybe he'd gone to bed tried to sleep couldn't sleep and then ended up just getting up and going out and abducting jessica lunsford all his other roommates in this trailer like his sister her boyfriend they couldn't give police any more information than that they genuinely did not know what junkie had done once he'd gone to bed because they were all asleep and police actually believed them on that but they did still charge every single one of them with obstructing this investigation because i mean they'd been lying the whole time they lied about him living there they lied about you know they lied about everything so they had to be charged but at this point police were still kind of left no closer to finding john cooey i mean they knew that he did live in this trailer at one point but still he was out there somewhere and they had no idea where he'd gone they had no idea how far he was which direction he'd gone in they just were quite hopeless at this point to be honest so they decided that the best course of action here would be to get the public involved why not have everyone's eyes looking for this man all at once they were only one police force they weren't going to be able to find him but maybe if they spreaded this man's picture his name everything about this case everywhere then maybe just a random member of the public might see him out recognize him and then call the police maybe that would be how they could find him they decided to just tell the public that they were looking for this man that they were looking for john cooey and they needed help because if people saw this they were going to want to help and that was kind of their only hope of finding this guy they'd exhausted every other lead that they had and other than that there was going to be no other way of finding him they were really hoping that someone was just gonna randomly spot him and it didn't take long before someone finally did only it was about 400 miles away this woman called the police from 400 miles away to say that she thinks that she had just met john cooey this woman said that she worked for a salvation army homeless shelter and she just checked in a man that she believed looked exactly like the pictures the mug shots of john cooey that she'd been seeing on the news but like i said this was 400 miles away this was in augusta in georgia obviously not the jurisdiction of jessica lunsford's case so this posed a couple of issues it was going to take police in florida about seven or eight hours to get all the way to augusta in georgia so something was gonna have to be done in the meantime police in augusta decided to step in and try to arrest john cooey on a different charge just so that they could keep hold of him keep tabs on him until florida police got there so georgia police decided to move into this homeless shelter and arrest john kewee the reason they gave was obviously his whole address thing he didn't update the police when he moved which is against the terms of his sex offenders register things so now he is being held in a holding cell in augusta georgia and he has no idea that police back in florida are on to him in fact they're on their way to come and speak to him now when they eventually got there they sat him down and they basically said look did you have anything to do with it just tell us and john kiwi said that he didn't he didn't know who jessica lundsvid was he only knew who she was because of the news he had seen her disappearance case on the news but other than that he said he'd never seen her before in his life like day-to-day life so then police asked him well why have you come to georgia you've never left homosassa in your whole life why now are you deciding to travel 400 miles to georgia and so kiwi said that he was actually trying to move there for work he was trying to get as far away from his toxic home town as he possibly could he felt like they're in her masasa he was just stuck in this cycle of drugs and alcohol and crime to be able to afford the drugs and alcohol like his life wasn't going to get any better unless he took himself out of that of course police didn't really believe that and so this questioning continued for hours and police could tell that john cooey was breaking down very quickly like whether it was the drugs and the alcohol in his system or even like withdrawals at this point making him really antsy and agitated but he was getting quite angry quite quickly he was like shouting at police saying i never did any of this i've never done anything actually i do think the police officers were provoking this kind of behavior from him because they went for like a classic good cop bad cop kind of kind of thing but the bad cop in this situation was actually just jarring like he was actually just rude and i think that is what was setting off john kerry it was later revealed that about four times during his questioning john kerry had asked for a lawyer and whenever someone like a suspect or whoever's being questioned whenever they ask for a lawyer that questioning has to stop right there right then and they're not allowed to ask any further questions without a lawyer present but these good cop bad cop guys that were questioning john kewee just ignored those requests they pretended like he never even said it and they just carried on asking him questions which is horrendous by the way and the transcripts of these questionings really show just how worn down john curry was in this questioning after hours and hours of being screamed at by mr bad cop and requesting to get a lawyer multiple times and just being ignored he kept making comments about how he was tired he was frustrated he was worn down he said that his brain was fried but the police didn't care they kept going until they were satisfied they questioned him for hours and hours and hours they didn't care that he was trying to exercise his right to a lawyer they continued the questioning all the way into the evening until eventually they realized that they really just weren't getting anything out of john kiwi and they let him go back to his holding cell it was a very unsuccessful questioning they really didn't get anything from him so the next morning police went and spoke with john kiwi in his cell and asked if he would be open to taking a polygraph test and he agreed so they took him down to the room where it was going to take place he sat down they hooked him up to all the equipment all the machinery and everything and the questions began if you don't know how a polygraph test usually works they start off with some more kind of easier questions just to kind of ease the person into it because if they're too anxious then the results will be inconclusive so they're asking these kind of shallow-ish questions there's nothing too deep just yet but they can tell that john cooey is losing his cool he was very clearly panicking more and more by the second until eventually he couldn't take it any longer and he just blurted out a confession he did it so police decided to take john kerry into a different room like an actual interrogation room that was being videotaped audio recorded and they asked him to make a formal confession which he did john cooey relived the night that he kidnapped jessica lunsford from start to finish but before we get into this confession let's talk a little bit more about john cooey like what kind of guy he was his upbringing born and raised in homosassa kui had quite a troubled life from the second he was born into a struggling family they had financial issues drug problems mental health problems i think as well his mother was with a new man every single month so she didn't really have much time for cui and so he was passed between relative and family member and mother's friends and everything he was very rarely actually looked after by his mother she was more preoccupied with these men so he had a very very rocky childhood he had no stability no certainty it's believed that john kerry was physically abused by a lot of these people that would look after him like different family members or friends or whatever and especially the man that his mother would end up with eventually like the man that became kind of his stepdad he was very very abusive and cui didn't even get a break from torment and abuse when he was at school because there he was relentlessly bullied he was tormented for a lot of different things physical appearance sporting ability but most notably his financial situation because he was very much in poverty he didn't have what a lot of the other kids had it's believed that cui from a very young age had some sort of mental illness or disability or something that just went undetected or undiagnosed and therefore untreated literally since childhood although i don't know specifically what mental illness or disability he is believed to have had going into his teenage years that was when john cooey began committing crimes mainly for money because of his financial situation he would rob people burgle homes but the first crime he ever committed was actually for an entirely different motive he decided to jump straight in at the deep end this is the first crime he has ever committed when he broke into a woman's house to sexually assault her he broke in and he pinned this woman down covering her mouth with his hand he started kissing her groping her and luckily this woman was able to fight him off before he could do anything else this woman reported the incident to the police and john cooey was actually sentenced to 10 years in prison for this but unfortunately he only served two of those 10 years which is disgraceful so he's in prison literally for two years of course he does not learn his lesson and the second he is released from prison he begins his whole life of crime that's when he starts getting into drugs and fraud he's burgling homes every other week to be able to afford cooking in his twenties john cooey met a woman named karen and she was just like him she was like the female version of him they'd both come from a very troubled background both lived in poverty and they were bullied and now they were both living a life of crime in their 20s to be able to afford drugs and different things like that she would also commit fraud she would burgle houses she even dipped in and out of prostitution all her life to be able to pay for drugs which she also had a lot of charges for drug possessions and stuff and karen was also a sexual predator just like john cooey was she also had a lot of different charges for public indecency um harassment sexual harassment it's been speculated in this case that the two of them got married and had a son together but there's no evidence of either of those things taking place doesn't mean they didn't they might just be like under the radar no kui did actually reference his son to the police a few times during his questioning so i mean actually maybe that is evidence i don't know but also at the same time john cooey was known to say a lot of things but that brings us back to the timeline actually where john cooey is now sat in the police station he's being videotaped audio tipped and he is about to confess the whole thing the whole jessica lunsford kidnapping from start to finish he told the police that he had actually lied beforehand when he said he didn't know who jessica was he'd never heard of her he said that he was aware of her before he kidnapped her because he'd actually seen her playing out in the yard outside her own trailer a couple of times so he knew that this young girl lived not too far away from him he knew exactly which trailer she lived in as well although he did tell police that he thought she was more around six years old she was obviously nine at the time but anyway on the night of the abduction february 24th 2005 remember john cooey and all of his friends his sister and everyone they were all drinking doing drugs at this scrap yard and then at 1am they ran out of money they ran out of drugs they ran out of drink so they decided to call it a night and go to bed kiwi said that he did try and go to sleep but he couldn't really sleep so he just laid there in bed he was flicking through porn magazines and eventually he decided that he just wanted to get out of bed and do something he decided that he actually wanted more drugs but he didn't have the money for said drugs and so he decided that he was going to break into someone's trailer and burgle them steal some money or something that he could sell for drugs and that was when he remembered the lunsfords they weren't the most well-off family ever but you know they were they were all right they had more money than cowie did for sure he knew that they were a respectable family they probably had some decent stuff that he could steal and so he said that that was his plan his plan was literally just to go to the trailer break in rob them and leave so john kiwi decides to sneak out of his own trailer that he lives in i don't know why he didn't just go out of the front door i believe he went through the window probably so that no one heard him leave but anyway john kiwi walked down the road and went in through the unlocked door of the lunsford trailer at around 3am so he was looking around in the living room kind of kitchen area he was looking for anything that he could steal and that was when he made a noise and woke up nine-year-old jessica lunsford he could tell that she was scared and so he went over to her put his hand over her mouth and just said don't yell or nothing i think he had another little look around for anything that he could steal but right now his mind was so occupied with the fact that he had literally just woken up this nine-year-old girl he knew that it was only a matter of time before something foiled this plan there was a witness there was a witness to him breaking in the house and trying to steal stuff and so he was stressed he didn't know what this little girl was gonna do so he needed to get out of there but he also knew that he couldn't just leave jessica there i mean she'd seen his face she was a witness she was gonna tell the police who had broken into the trailer so he knew he needed to do something about that so instead john cooey just instructed jessica to follow him out of the trailer to not say a single word and just follow him out and of course jessica was terrified she was gonna do whatever this man told her but she did ask if she could take one of her stuffed animals with her junkie said yes and so she went back into her room climbed up onto her bed and grabbed the purple dolphin that her father won for her at the florida state fair a week prior she hugged it close to her chest and she followed john cooey out of the trailer they walked the 100 yards down to cui's trailer and there he helped jessica climb in through the window and they both got into his bedroom and that was when john cooey proceeded to rip nine-year-old jessica he said that quickly after the two of them fell asleep they're in his bed next to each other and when he awoke the next morning still with nine-year-old jessica laying next to him he proceeded to rape her a second time when he was done he then shoved jessica into the closet of his bedroom and told her to stay there all day while he was at work now we know that he doesn't work of course she didn't know that his work was just him going out robbing people buying drugs doing drugs like he just wanted to keep her in the closet until he returned he wasn't actually working he just wanted to go out all day and then have his new captive still at home for him to return to him so he shook jessica in the closet and then he actually turned on the tv in his bedroom so that she could at least have some kind of noise on all day well let's be real he probably didn't do it for jessica's benefit he probably did it just in case she moved or coughed or anything that other people in the trailer wouldn't hear that but anyway he turned this tv on and then he left and jessica just obediently waited there in the closet she was too scared to try to escape or move and so she waited there all day until her captor came back but when kui did come back however he didn't let her out the closet he'd been debating all day whether this was really worth it he was thinking should i let her go should i just let her go back to her family or is it too late now like if i let her go will she tell the police and will i get caught for this is it too late he knew that he was gonna be in so much trouble if he did let her go and so he knew at this point that it was just too far gone he couldn't let her back home so jessica lunsford was forced to stay inside that closet she wasn't even allowed back on the bed now to sleep the only time she was allowed back on the bed was when john kerry raped her again and again over the course of three more days kui said that jessica did try to fight him off from time to time when he would try and rape her she would try and push him off and try and put her clothes back on but ultimately he said that he would always get his own way he barely fed jessica while she was there while she was being kept in the closet i think he brought her a burger at one point and that's about it he didn't feed her he didn't give her any water and like i said she was there for three more days three days where during the day kiwi would go to work and she would be forced to just stand in this tight closet and do nothing all she can do is just think about what is happening to her and where she is where her family are are her family looking for her but i mean she did have the noise of the tv and so it's believed that at some point over the three days that she was in that closet she must have heard one of the tv appeals that was looking for her they were on like every single channel so there was a good chance that she did see it and there were a bunch of tv appeals of her father begging for her to come home crying on the tv she might have even heard that which is just heartbreaking to think of just the thought of this nine-year-old girl being stuck in a closet cuddling this purple dolphin that her father got for her while she's listening to her father crying for her on the news it oh my god but that's not even the most heartbreaking part of this case i know it seems like it can't get any worse but it does while jessica lunsford was being held there in that closet police came round to the trailer to come and find john kerry remember they were going around questioning all these different sex offenders it was literally just a couple of days into the investigation when they got to the trailer so they didn't have the search warrant quite yet at this time so they couldn't search the whole thing but police did have a quick glance in each of the rooms and one of those rooms was the room that jessica was in and faithfully that police officer just didn't open the closet door if he had jessica would have been saved but he didn't and honestly i have been doing this job long enough that i don't really cry at true crime cases anymore but the thought of this nine-year-old girl hearing the police walking around talking to people in there the hope that must have been building up inside of her thinking oh my god when they get to this room they'll open the closet and they'll take me and i'll be fine i'll be free just the thought of her thinking that she's going to be rescued and that she can go home to her dad and that this was all going to be over and then her just hearing this officer come into the room and then go out again and close the door behind him and then they'd come in and get her that is just i just can't imagine how that must have felt for her you know and it is so easy to say in retrospect that oh that officer should have just checked the closet they should have just done this or done that they should have done this quicker but that officer was literally just doing the job that he was sent there to do he didn't have a search warrant they also weren't even really there to look for jessica at this point they were there to look for john cooey they hadn't made that concrete connection between kiwi and jessica just yet they just wanted to interview this guy so they were looking in each of the rooms for him not for a little girl in the closet they were just there to charge some guy because he hadn't updated his address on the sex offenders register that was why they were there i'll be honest i did have a lot more sympathy for these police officers before i watched the documentary that jessica's father made i think it's called jesse's dad i really do recommend that documentary if you want to look further into this case because it's all from mark lundsford's point of view so it goes so much into how him and his father were treated as suspects as i was first researching this i was thinking well it's not the police officer's fault like i'm sure it's eating them alive the thought that they could have saved jessica but they were just a couple of meters away from her and they didn't save her but when you see all the campaigning that her father has done in in the aftermath of this it's hard to feel any kind of sympathy for those police officers honestly anyway the officers were in john kerry's trailer and they never saw jessica and so they left and john junky returned later on that day and when he returns obviously all of his roommates tell him about how the police were here they were looking for him and so now he panics he knows he has to flee and he needs to get rid of jessica that was a very very close call for him had he been home at the time he would have been caught and he decided that he wasn't gonna let that happen he decided that he was going to have to murder his captive jessica lunsford and he had a plan of how he was gonna do this obviously the streets right outside of his trailer were full of police i mean he lived 100 yards away from the place where she disappeared from so there were police coming going there were cars they'd made like a pop-up tent so that they could work like directly from the scene so that like i mean there were hundreds of police officers outside of john kerry's house is basically what i'm trying to say and i mean they were all looking for the exact girl that he was trying to get rid of so it was gonna be very very hard for him to get rid of her without being detected so he turned to jessica and he said right i'm gonna take you home i'm gonna take you back to your family i'm gonna leave you there for them to find as long as you don't tell anyone and so again she is filled with all of this hope she's thinking that she's gonna go home back to her dad back to her grandparents back to her loving family and so this man john kerry told her to get into a plastic bin bag and so she did voluntarily she was like yes okay whatever it takes to get me home to my family he said that once she was in there he was gonna tie it and then he was gonna take her out and leave her out on the lawn just like a garbage bag but then she would be able to get out and go back to her family but of course that was never john cooy's plan that was what he told jessica his plan was but he was never gonna let her go home it was too far gone in his head now instead later that night he went out to his own backyard and started digging a hole he then came back inside made jessica climb into two bin bags she had one kind of over her feet one over her head and he somehow tied them in the middle he then picked her up carried her outside into his own garden and threw her into the hole that he had dug bear in mind as i tell the rest of this story that there are policemen just meters away on the street outside however john cooy's house was unfortunately blocked by the police tent that they put up so that they could have a base on the street ironically enough that base that they put up was blocking the actual crime that was going on behind it he put jessie in this hall grabbed a shovel and then began shoveling mud over her his plan was that he was gonna fill this hole with mud and bury this nine-year-old girl alive and that is exactly what he proceeded to do he covered jessica over with mud patted it all down and then covered the area with some leaves and stuff so that they wouldn't be able to tell where the ground had been dug up and he left her there left her there to die and it was then that john cooey realized that he had to get away too because it was only a matter of time until police were on his case about this and so he ran inside the trailer and asked his niece to buy him a one-way bus ticket to georgia of course it couldn't be under john kerry's name otherwise police would follow him there they would know where he was and it's actually unclear whether his niece knew why she was buying him a ticket to georgia did she know that he was in trouble i mean yes she probably knew that he was in trouble for all the sex offender stuff that was going on but did she know that he just murdered a little girl and now he was on the run for it either way she bought him this ticket and john cooey then hopped on the bus and traveled the 300 and some miles to savannah georgia first so when he got to savannah he then got off the bus and he started looking for a place to stay obviously he was planning on being on the run from police for the rest of his life and he had very limited money he knew he was going to have to make this money last he could have gone and checked into a hotel but that would have been a big chunk of his money gone straight away just on accommodation so he decided that he was just going to try and find a homeless shelter or a hostel or something like that and just kind of sleep rough a bit so cui found a homeless shelter and he went and checked in weirdly enough under his real name which is that not the stupidest thing you've ever heard if you're going to get your niece to buy you a train ticket so that the train ticket's not under your name surely you would use a fake name a homeless shelter where it's not even really gonna get like traced back anywhere anyway this turned out to be a fateful mistake because the second they put his name in on the system it flagged up that this man had a warrant out for his arrest not for jessica lunsford's disappearance but for the sex offender address situation savannah police came down to the homeless shelter they arrested him they took him back to the police station and unfortunately they were completely unaware of the whole jessica lunsford disappearance the fact that he was a suspect and they eventually just let him go so cui was back out on the streets he had a very close call there and he was very shaken up he didn't want to stay in savannah much longer because he knew that he was now known to the police so he decided to flee once again he couldn't really afford to get out of georgia entirely so instead he just traveled two hours from savannah to augusta he thought that getting to augusta was gonna get him away from the police but it wasn't gonna be that easy because by now in the case jessica lunsford's disappearance was national news it was all over america not even just florida like georgia police were aware of this her face her disappearance was on every single news channel and soon enough so was john cooy's police had put his previous mug shots everywhere saying we are looking for this man in relation to this disappearance if you see him contact us i don't know if john cooey himself knew that he was all over the news at this point but anyway he arrived in augusta and he was walking around just like any other normal person he eventually found himself at a new homeless shelter the salvation army homeless shelter and he checked in and he got in successfully he thought everything was good little did he know that the woman that checked him in recognized him from these news reports and she went back into the back of the shelter called the police and said look i think i've got this guy and that is eventually how he was caught and brought down for this crime after he sat there in the police station and gave the full confession of everything he eventually told them where they could find jessica lunzford's body now this part of the case is so upsetting i myself even struggled and i'd do this for a living so if you want to skip forward a couple of minutes i'll get editor jack to put in a time stamp for you because this is so heartbreaking the way that her body was found just after midnight that night police in florida arrived at the trailer that john kiwi lived at and they went and dug up the severely decomposed remains of nine-year-old jessica lunsford she was found with her wrists tied together of course she was still inside this whole bin bag thing that john kerry had made her get into and jessica before she died she'd actually managed to poke out two of her fingers through this bin bag of course her wrists were tied so she really couldn't do much but they believed that her poking her fingers out was her trying to escape her trying to free herself from what she knew was gonna be her impending death and since these two fingers were outside of the bin bag they were just in the soil they'd completely decomposed they were just born all the skin all the flesh all the muscle was all gone jessica's body was fully clothed when she was found although her father said that he didn't recognize the shorts and t-shirt that she was wearing that wasn't the night dress that she was wearing on the night that she disappeared and it's unknown where these clothes came from if jungkook gave her them went out and bought them stole them and then her other hand so of course one of them was kind of poked through the bin bag i think her hands were kind of pressed up to her here she'd managed to poke two fingers through the bin bag and in this other hand she was clutching that stuffed purple dolphin that her father had won for her at the fair she was clutching it as close to her chest as she possibly could which is the most heartbreaking thing i've ever read in a case like this it's heartbreaking but also at the same time it's like i really hope that that gave her some sort of comfort in her final moments to to hold that close to her chest and to feel as though she was kind of close to her dad i'd oh god anyway because jessica's body was so severely decomposed when she was found um an autopsy was pretty much out of the question they couldn't really do anything or find anything from her body i mean one was performed to the best that they could but nothing could really be found at that stage they couldn't even determine an official cause of death i mean her cause of death is is pretty obvious based on how her body was found and also from john kiwi's confession they know her cause of death but like an official one from an autopsy couldn't be registered it's obvious that her cause of death was suffocation though because it was very clear that she was still alive when she was buried for her to have poked her fingers through the bag and everything and there were no other injuries to her body there was no blood or stab wounds or anything so it was very clear that that was what happened although there were a number of injuries to her genitals from the relentless sexual assault that she had faced over the few days running up to her murder some of these injuries were actually sustained just a few hours before her death as well so this torture had been going on right until the very end it's been estimated that it probably took about three minutes of jessica being fully covered in the mud in this carrier bag for her to actually suffocate and die which is awful i mean three minutes doesn't sound like a long time but i imagine in that situation i bet it feels like an eternity when there's nothing else to do nothing else to think about other than the fact that you're about to die any second it was found that jessica's stomach and all of her digestive tract and everything was completely empty at the time of her death it's not known exactly how much jessica was fed throughout her captivity but this suggests that she hadn't eaten in days there were also traces of cocaine found on her body but nothing in her like she hadn't ingested it her toxicology report was completely clean so i mean she hadn't ingested any but she probably like touched it on the sides i imagine this trailer had cooking everywhere but anyway following all of this john evander cooy was charged with the murder of nine-year-old jessica lunsford and sir he was sent to a holding cell awaiting his trial well he was actually charged with way more than just the murder he was charged with capital murder kidnapping burglary sexual battery and i think a couple more things like obviously avoiding police and stuff like that when he's like fled and stuff like that there were a lot of charges against this man and while he was in this holding cell john cooey was actually put on suicide watch based on a couple of comments that he'd made to the police throughout his questioning they just didn't deem it safe to leave this man by himself in the meantime police also went down to john kerry's trailer and arrested every single one of those his sister her boyfriend the other two all with obstructing the investigation it's not clear exactly how much they knew but they were certainly covering for him at points they all lied for him in some way or another they all knew that he'd fled to georgia and they weren't telling the police that had they told the police that earlier on like literally within the first couple of days jessica could have been saved john cooey's trial rolled around in the march of 2007 so two years after after the incident after the kidnapping and murder which is a long time but the reason it did take so long is because this case was so high profile like i said it was national news people in every single state knew about this kidnapping and murder they all knew who john kuhi was and for that reason it meant that it was really hard to find an impartial fair jury for the trial because everyone already had their preconceptions of this man they all hated him like everyone in homosassa surrounding areas hated this man so there was no way that they could put him on trial near there so they actually had to go to miami florida instead unfortunately for the prosecution in the trial there was about to be a huge bombshell dropped on the first day of the trial and that was that john cooey's confession was inadmissible in court the biggest piece of evidence a literal detailed confession from the murderer can't be used as evidence the reason for that being because john cooey had asked multiple times in his first questioning if he could have a lawyer and multiple times mr good cop mr bad cop ignored him this meant that he had an unfair interrogation he was not allowed his rights and so for that reason all of the police work like all the questionings interrogations confessions none of it could be used because it was clear that it was all done unfairly they weren't doing it by the rules luckily though for the prosecution there was a whole lot more evidence i mean literally she was found buried outside of his house there was also the mattress remember the mattress that was found in john kewee's bedroom with the blood stain on it that bloodstain was tested it was found to belong to jessica lunsford and it was also mixed with the dna of john kiwi and this dna was semen dna which told the prosecution everything they needed to know about the rape charges at least jessica's fingerprints were also found like all over the closet that she'd been forced to stay in for days and then there was him going on the run i know that's not direct evidence but what kind of an innocent person goes on the run 400 miles away so kiwi's defense heard all this they know this is a damning trial against them and they were going to struggle to get john kiwi off of this charge but he was going to try anywhere they decided to argue that john cooey had mental disabilities from a very very young age after being born premature and from doing a lot of drugs as a child like it had messed with his brain they said that it had been undetected undiagnosed untreated and that is why he did what he did not only that but they also tried to argue that all of the abuse that john kerry faced throughout his childhood from like his mother's partner and all these different family members they said that that had really messed up his brain and like his perception of what violence is like is violence allowed kind of thing he'd experienced it as being a very normal thing all his life they also said that this had given him mental illnesses and like they were essentially just trying to do kind of an insanity plea but a bit more like more of a disability plea they were more going from the angle that his brain physically was not you know the same as everyone else's they did get him to do an iq test in the hopes that that might prove that he has some kind of intellectual disability he scored 78 on the iq test but the threshold for having some kind of intellectual disability is actually below 70. he got 78. so that wasn't any kind of evidence for that if anything it actually just proved them wrong to the car it was like they handed over this evidence we are wrong anyway on march 7th 2007 john cooey was found guilty of course on all charges and for that he was sentenced to death but you know how these execution things go they sentence them to death and then they don't actually get executed for like 20 years or something it always takes so long they end up serving so much time in prison by the time their death day eventually rolls around and john cooey was actually never going to get to see his execution date because he actually died of cancer on september 30th 2009 before his execution date was even announced as all of that had been happening jessica lundsford's family had been trying to come to terms with everything that had happened all the pain that their sweet little girl had gone through it was all just so unnecessary and jessica's father mark lundsford was particularly passionate about making sure that this never happens to another child ever again he felt like he needed to do something in her legacy to protect other children and so he decided to become an activist and he started within weeks of jessica's body being found he wrote to anyone and everyone that was in power in florida begging for tougher laws on sex offenders when mark found out that john cooey was on the sex offenders register for molesting a child he was infuriated to know that this man had been allowed to just walk the streets that he wasn't locked away and he was especially angry to hear that the 10-year sentence that jungkook should have gotten for his first ever crime when he broke into that woman's house and assaulted her he got the 10-year sentence and only served two years of that of course he's not gonna learn his lesson of course that's gonna make him think that he can go out and do the same thing again and have barely any consequences for it because two years is nothing another way that police let the community down let jessica lunsford down let her family down was that they were actually supposed to arrest john cooey two weeks before jessica's disappearance but they didn't he had some kind of warrant out for his arrest i don't know if it was drugs i don't know if it was another burglary or something like that but they just didn't chase him up on it they didn't go and arrest him whether they didn't have time whether they couldn't be bothered i don't know i don't know why the police didn't do that but if they had if they'd done their job then that man wouldn't have been out murdering children they would have realized that he was at the wrong address and not only would he have been charged for whatever the warrant out for his arrest was but they would also have realized that he was at the wrong address he would have been charged for that he would be in prison he wouldn't be out kidnapping nine-year-old girls if police had just done their job it was also the fact that it took them so long to search the trailer that jessie was locked in it later turned out that they'd actually been to that trailer twice while she was in that closet not just the once twice and they didn't open that closet door and find her at first when you hear oh the police came and looked around they glanced in each room and they didn't see her you kind of feel sorry for the police officer at the same time thinking oh i bet they're beating themselves up over it but if you've been to the trailer twice and you're not even looking around then that's negligence that's no longer just an unfortunate thing there were two opportunities to find her and save her and bring her home one of the police reports even says that the second time they went to the trailer and had a look around the person that opened the door to the police was openly nervous and shaken yet they didn't properly search the premises the lunsford family just felt so let down by the police jessica lunsford was let down so badly by florida police mark remembered seeing them all just kind of stood about on the street when the searches were supposed to be taking place they were all just stood talking or sat at desks or whatever and he remembers thinking why aren't you doing something why aren't you helping me find my daughter like i said they set up that tent right outside the lunsford home to act as kind of like a base for the investigation but he never really saw anything going on there and it was because of this tent the police didn't see john cooey literally burying jessica lunsford alive in his garden because their stupid tent was in the way i get that they need a base but maybe don't block the home of a registered sex offender if those are the kind of people you're looking for maybe this case really truly infuriates me and please please do watch the documentary jessie's dad it's on amazon prime i think that's where i watched it because mark's girlfriend even tells this story in the documentary that even the police some of the police were ashamed to be a part of the investigation there was one particular time where mark was he was really upset and he was telling his friend just how disappointed and let down he felt by the police on this case and that was when he noticed a police officer nearby this police officer wasn't in uniform but he did have his badge around his neck and as mark was saying all of this to his friend he was so emotional to his friend talking about how he felt let down this police officer went like this over his badge just stood there and covered it because he was embarrassed to be part of that police force that was letting this man and his family and his daughter his nine-year-old daughter down so badly it was later found that that police officer that covered his badge turned round to the woman that was stood next to him and said i've never been so embarrassed to be a police officer following all of this case mark lunsford knew that he had a lot of work to do in his daughter's memory and so he made the very brave decision to quit his job and become a full-time activist he campaigned for a law that was later named jessica's law or the jessica lunsford act and this brought about more intense tracking of sex offenders this act also brings about higher sentences for people that are charged with sex crimes against children it also says that people in the area must be notified if a sex offender moves close by it's basically just loads of different ways to make it harder for sex offenders to re-offend because that's exactly what john kuhi did he was a sex offender that was not looked at not kept tabs on properly and he was able to reoffend ten times worse as well had jessica's law or the jessica lunsford act been a thing while jessica was still alive jonkery wouldn't have been allowed to do what he did there would have been a lot more obstacles in the way at least a lot more chances to catch him are to be a lot more wary around him i suppose surprisingly enough when mark lundsford went to all these different states with his new law proposition he was met with a lot of resistance from quite a few states it seemed that they weren't up for making the world a safer place for children and that was because judges in courts didn't like the fact that mark lunsford wanted mandatory sentences for sex offenders he wanted to make sure that any and every child sexual predator was given some kind of base sentence in prison like a minimum sentence in prison but the judges weren't on board with that because oh it takes away their discretion it's supposed to be their choice if someone gets a sentence these are people that have committed sex crimes against children like you can decide in the other cases whether they get a sentence or how big their sentence is that you can do but people that have committed sex crimes against children why are you not just on board with it like these judges want their power more than they want children to be safe which is disgusting to me but mark lunsford kept fighting for jesse in jesse's memory and to make the world a safer place for children he wasn't gonna give him that easy and today i think it's 42 states that have passed jesse's law it's actually jessica's law jessica lunsford act 42 states this man has changed with his activism which is amazing 42 states where children are going to be so much more safer because of this one man you can really see how much passion mark lundsford has for his activism like he's done so much so many fundraisers like i said he was part of like a motorcycle club and so him and all of his motorcycle friends have got together to do like long-distance rides to raise money for her well for him campaigning for the jessica lunsford act i suppose these rides that they do to raise money are called jessie's riders and they all have these um biker jackets made and especially mark lundsfitz he's got jessie's face on the back of his jacket and he wears it every time he goes on his motorbike mark lundsford also has a huge tattoo of jesse on his torso which i'll try and find a picture of i don't know if i'll be able to find one the whole family have just done as much as they possibly can to either memorialize her or make a difference in her memory her grandmother ruth still buys jessica presents whenever she goes shopping whenever she sees something that jessie might have liked she'll buy her it and then she'll take it back to her bedroom and put it up for her and her bedroom is the exact same as it was when she disappeared only now it's a lot more cluttered because her grandma keeps bringing her back presents but the lunsford family made headlines again in 2007 when mark lundsford's son josh to his previous marriage was actually charged with a sex crime josh was 18 at the time and he had sexual relations with his 14 year old girlfriend and the age of consent in ohio where this took place was 16. so technically his girlfriend was legally unable to consent which makes this unlawful sexual conduct against a minor the person that reported this was not the girl it was the girl's mother because she wasn't happy about josh and her daughter's relationship now the media got wind of this and they took it and ran they posted about how this activist's son had committed the exact same crimes that his father was campaigning against at risk of saying anything too controversial i'll keep this short but i think this situation is a lot more nuanced than what john cooey did to a child at the end of the day the law is the law for a reason the age of consent exists for a reason and it's believed that you can't properly consent to anything on that level until your brain is developed as much as it is at the age of 16. no matter how much a 14 year old girl thinks she can make decisions for herself and trust me i know i've been a 14 year old girl obviously but legally they are not able to consent even if they think they can legally it's still against the law isn't it mark lunsford defends his son for this saying that this situation is entirely different which i do agree i agree that it's entirely different that is i'm not you know i'm not saying i'm not trying not to be controversial mark says that the couple had been together for years doing that exact same thing they were having sex for years this 14 year old girl and the 17 year old josh and then the second that josh turns 18 and they do it again this girl's family get in contact with the police because they didn't like josh that's what mark lundsford says anyway i have a quote from mark lunsford on the mata we're talking about romeo and juliet here not some 36 year old pervert following around a 10 year old and that's where i'm gonna leave that i'm not gonna say anything more on that and that is all i have on this case thank you so so much for watching i really do appreciate it i'll try and leave some links down below i don't know if they're still raising money they might be so have a look in the description maybe check it see if you can donate something because i mean mark lundsford has done amazing things in his daughter's memory this case is so so heartbreaking but i love hearing cases where the family want to do something in their loved one's memory i think it's just so special i think it's so wonderful that even in the amount of grief that mark lundsford must have been in he still found that energy inside of him to campaign to make life safer for other children but yeah thank you so so much for watching this video thanks again to nordvpn for sponsoring this video remember if you want to get a huge discount off of a two-year plan plus a bonus gift you can go through my link which is nordvpn.com forward slash eleanor and use the code eleanor at checkout huge thank you to all of my channel members for helping me decide the cases that i cover especially my tier 2 members whose names are all on screen right now if you want to become a channel member you can just click the join button on a desktop or there'll be a link in the description of this video but yeah thank you so so much for watching if you enjoyed please leave a thumbs up down below because that would really help me out if you enjoyed this video i do make a lot of other content like this you can scroll subscribe as well you can subscribe using this link right here in the circle if you want to subscribe to my second channel i've started posting over there huh ah get me um it's a lot more like light-hearted content over there you can click that if you want to subscribe and if you want to watch another true crime video there'll be a playlist on screen right now bye

Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,530,171

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, bbc, itv, netflix, dateline, interview, news, jessica lunsford, jessica, lunford, mark, the jessica lunsford act, jessica's law, mark lunsford, jessie's dad, kidnapping, abduction, missing, unsolved disappearance, john couey, florida, usa, miami, story, parents, 2021, true crime daily, john, couey

Id: 0Bu9caW4BzU

Length: 58min 22sec (3502 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021